Still thinking about it now. What it might mean. If I’m being foolish to think it might mean what I’d like it to mean. Wishing Mathuin was dead and buried so she could stop worrying and maybe let herself have time for . . . Nah. Doesn’t pay to get ahead of yourself, Bonehead. Let yourself dream too deep, and sure as sure the next thing will be a nasty wake-up, bucket of slops in the face like in the lockup. So I go on to the third thing that’s in my mind. Bardán. The wild man. Bardán the builder, who used to live in this hut I’m heading for. Not so far from Tóla’s house at all, only on the other side of the wood. If what those folk were saying is true, Bardán had a mother and father and a wife, and they’re all buried up there. Danu save us. No wonder the man’s half-crazy. Loses his whole family, then ends up in the Otherworld for years and years. And some time in the middle of that he was building the heartwood house and stopped with the place half-finished. Must be folk in these parts who know more about all that, what happened to him, the bits he still can’t remember. But that can wait. The herbs can’t.

Doesn’t take long to get there. I tie the horse to the post and head in on foot. Not much of a path left; that fellow was right about nobody coming this way anymore. Only not quite right, because when I get to the old hut, someone’s there before me.

I stop dead in my tracks. Bardán. Bardán, who’s not allowed to leave Wolf Glen. Bardán, all the way over here, sitting on the broken steps outside the hut. Face all tears. Something in his hands, an old cloth of some kind.

‘Grim,’ he whispers, and gets to his feet. Ready to run, is my guess. Looking as wild as he did the day I first saw him.

‘It’s all right,’ I say, quiet-like. Thinking of trying to catch a dog or a horse that’s spooked. Thinking how slow and careful you have to be, not to send them bolting in panic. ‘I haven’t come to look for you. I need to pick some herbs – calamint – for Blackthorn. My friend, you know, the healer. Woman down in Longwater giving birth, or trying to. Need to find the plant in a hurry.’ Cast my eye over what might have been a garden, long ago. Remains of a drystone wall, something that could have been a path. Stuff growing everywhere, all under and over and tangled through itself. Maybe there’s calamint there, but finding it’s going to take time. And that’s what I haven’t got.